Past Exhibitions – 2017

2017

Pamela Blum

Like and Unlike

On Saturday, November 11th, there will be an exhibition of sculpture by Pamela Blum in the Main Galleries. The work will be on display through December 3rd with a reception for the artist on Saturday, November 11th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m. The Sculpture Garden and Carriage House will be closed for the season.

Artist’s intent: My works offer no perfect, permanent read. The exhibit’s title, Like and Unlike, asks the viewer to compare and contrast visuals, titles and metaphors. I see these works as comical, lyrical, abject, and satirical references to human foibles, misused tools, misunderstood words, and looming environmental catastrophe. The work begs to be touched.

What I stole from history: Art, like all invention, is infused with beliefs. In effect I “steal” from old beliefs to recombine them into new understanding.

Misunderstanding=recombination, invention: Many historical beliefs are seen as misunderstanding. That is the course of civilization. I try to make sense of current ideas about history, human behavior, societies, complexity theory, and energy as a kind of gravity opposing entropy. I realize that others’ ideas will supersede my own, so I embrace energy and entropy as important factors in my work.

Materials: For example, my sculptures are made of so-called “archival” materials. Encaustic paint covers some works, acid-free handmade paper others. Encaustic (beeswax) provides a metaphor for two contrasts: longevity and fragility. So does the paper. Wax in the right environment lasts thousands of years. But in moments, heat, cold, or touch can destroy it. Paper lasts for centuries. But fire, water, pressure, pollution, and skin oils can consume it.

Entropy & energy: Regardless of archival materials, my work, like my ideas, moves towards dissolution. It will not last forever. For now, my work fights entropy. I view vision, words and other language modes as forms of energy. I try to compress energy into meaning. My sculptures act like “strange attractors” where specific energies come together.

My works are improbable combinations of familiar components. The works’ titles imply a search, meaning. Their forms refer to animals, plants, tools, grammar and punctuation. Just as energy and entropy are opposites, so are whites and blacks, extremes that transition into each other. Surfaces, marks, and values emerge and submerge. Paper suggests effects of time and natural forces. Different contexts give arrangements of my work different meanings.

Thanks: I would like to thank John Davis, R&F Handmade Paints, Judy Sigunick, Richard Frumess, Millicent Young, and other friends who have contributed to this exhibit.

Pamela Blum, 2017

On Saturday, October 14th, there will be an exhibition of six artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through November 5th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, October 14th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Front Galleries
La Wilson

Constructions

John Davis began showing the work of La Wilson in 1983 in Akron, Ohio and continued with Ms. Wilson when his gallery moved to New York City. Including the 2004 retrospective that Mr. Davis curated, La Wilson Altered Objects (at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College), this upcoming show will be the 16th exhibition of Ms. Wilson’s work that the artist and dealer have presented together. It will also mark Ms. Wilson’s eighth exhibition in Hudson, New York, (the first, having been recognized and reviewed in The New York Times). She visits Hudson, New York from Hudson, Ohio where she lives and has shown extensively in the mid-west and New York City.

Ms. Wilson was given a retrospective of her work at The Akron Art Museum in 1986/1987 titled La Wilson Metaphorical Objects. Kathleen Monaghan (then Director) initiated and selected work and Barbara Tannenbaum (then Chief Curator and Head of Public Programs) facilitated the installation and supervised the production of the brochure with the late Ellen H. Johnson’s contribution of an interview with La and Ms. Monaghan contributing the introduction. In 1992 Tom Hinson, curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum, chose a group of La’s works to exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1993, the artist received the top award for sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art May Show. It was in this same year that La was awarded the prestigious “Cleveland Arts Prize in Visual Arts” for sculpture. In 2004 the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania) mounted a retrospective of her work, titled La Wilson Altered Objects with catalogue essay by Edward M. Gomez, curated by John Davis.

In all of her work, La Wilson has confounded those who have watched her development as an artist over the years with her ability to defy the material and transform everyday objects into visual delights that convey profound meaning and sustenance. In her words, “I try to steer clear of objects that are too loaded with meaning; but then, when I think about it, everything I use is loaded – snakes, pencils, firecrackers, matches, hair pins. What I try to do is free myself from the conscious associations so that the unconscious ones can take over. I am much more interested in what I don’t know than what I do know.”

Sculpture Garden & First Floor Carriage House
Brandt Junceau

recent work

fragment (Camille), terra cotta, 5.5 inches

“The exhibition is mostly drawn from continuing work, but also includes a piece from a project in progress, Sylvania, about the American essayist John Jay Chapman (1862-1933). Meadow, a figure in a landscape, “illuminates” a moral crisis in Chapman’s young manhood.

Two of the face-pieces are portraits. One from a friend, the other an imaginary likeness of Camille Claudel (1864-1943), based on a historical portrait from life. The Classical Head fragment comes from a continuing thought-experiment, which attempts to recover the model behind the Classical ideal head.

Two plaster “birds” come from a continuing preoccupation with winged figures. A credible winged figure is an impossible proposition, really, without recourse to ambiguity and metaphor. But maybe with enough ambiguity, anything is possible.

The bronzes outdoors attempt a “figure degree-zero.” Could one achieve the seeming presence of standing person in an undivided form, without parts, without replication of features?

Brandt Junceau, 2017

Carriage House, Second Floor (small rooms)
Brian Rego

Recent Paintings

“I think when something is truly beautiful, it is unknowable, and can reveal itself an infinite number of ways without denying the very quality that gives it its beauty. I paint to understand the things around me and to know my place with them. The process of making a painting allows me to find meaning in unsuspecting ways. I am grateful because I am coming to know a reality that is rich, strange, and full of surprises.”

Carriage House, Second Floor
Paul Hamann

Photographs

Self-taught photographer Paul Hamann has been making black and white images since 1968, exploring through various camera formats and printing techniques, the aspects of the natural landscape.

Inspired by the work of the great landscape photographers and armed with a keen interest in the natural mathematics of order/chaos, Hamann’s photographs seek to reveal the patterns and sequences in the exterior natural landscape in a way that transcends the subject matter and draws us into a space that surrounds the subject of the image.

Working first with a 35mm camera, Hamann began taking pictures with an eye to the details and abstractions that captured the essence of what he saw. He soon began to explore the greater range and depth of large format negatives—first working with a 5×7 camera and later experimenting with 4×5 and even larger formats. The technical requirements of shooting with the larger format cameras as well as the resulting clarity and definition of the images proved perfectly suited to the detail and precision of Hamann’s creative vision.

Susan Sontag said, “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” This distinction is certainly true of landscape photography. Although Paul Hamann’s photographs are essentially disclosing their subject they are also in effect constructed by the almost mathematical imagination with which they are composed, exposed and printed. The images themselves also construct a sort of meta landscape, stringing the tension between what is perceived on the surface of the image and what might be hidden behind, around, beneath or within it—the landscape of the interior.

This tension between what is constructed and what is disclosed is at the core of what Paul Hamann’s images are about—revealing the ordered patterns in the chaos, the motion in the perceived stillness, the interior of the exterior.

AERABLA – Paintings

I continue painting. I am an explorer: imagining floating over the land from a great enough distance. Aerial views of battered landscapes, degraded by human-caused disasters become, in pulling back from the chaos, a great beauty, which enables me to envision the absence of human intervention.”

Priscilla Derven, 2017

On Saturday, September 16th , there will be an exhibition of five artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through October 8th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, September 16th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Front Galleries & Sculpture Garden
Ben Butler

Sculpture

“My sculptures and drawings reflect the sensibility that all complex forms and phenomena emerge from simple but persistent processes. Throughout the natural world, unexpected richness and complexity can be traced to the most basic properties of materials and the most elemental forces. Accumulation and time render profound and varied results. Every thing, under close enough observation, will reveal the complete story of its making.

I work with strict systems that establish narrow parameters for making – finite materials are manipulated by highly repetitive gestures. The work develops a quality of unpredictability as gestures accumulate into form. Each piece is a meditation on our relationship to natural objects, as it simultaneously references both human and non-human processes. It is not designed but discovered, or grown, and it holds evidence of unseen forces at work.”

“Rarely in my experience has the meeting up of a father and son yielded such joy! A selection of paintings by Louis Finkelstein and his son Henry Finkelstein are being shown for the first time in adjacent spaces at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY. They give us a lot to contemplate.

Louis Finkelstein, a second generation Abstract Expressionist, made a name for himself as he exhibited with, spoke about and wrote about the artists of his generation and their influences. His son Henry was raised and schooled in this rich and fertile environment (his mother Gretna Campbell was in her own right a talented and successful artist). Henry has been teaching and exhibiting since early in his career and is sought after by students, art schools and collectors alike.

Louis and Henry work in territory first travelled by the impressionists. It is an arena demarked by the need to resolve the structure of the painting, the abstraction, whilst in the act of making the painting in-situ, in front of the motif. It’s a highly risky and uncertain approach, with no guarantees of success yet open to all sorts of possibilities.

The works in these exhibitions give us the opportunity to enjoy just how much they have invented and to glimpse into the nature of the relationship between father and son, comparing similarities and differences of approach, motif, manner and even influence. Both are creating worlds with their minds and coloring them with emotions, responses to the light and landscapes which they love. Pierre Bonnard once said; “The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world… the picture… which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him”.

It’s not surprising then, that here in Hudson, in the Twenty First century, we find the paintings of both Louis and Henry Finkelstein so rewarding and full of sensuous experience, but I suspect we’d draw the same conclusions no matter where they are hung. It’s a testament to the artistic vision of John Davis that he desired to see them here, together, now.”

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
Lee Marshall

New Watercolors

“A painting can be marvelous company. I try to paint that kind of painting.”

Lee Marshall, 2017

On Saturday, August 19th, there will be an exhibition of six artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through September 10th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, August 19th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Front Galleries
Michael David

Navigators, Golems and Geishas

The Navigator 4, 2012-2016, encaustic on wood, 36 x 42 inches

“Since I was a baby, I have always painted. My mother was a painter, and her father was a painter. My work has its roots in three great schools of art to emerge out of NYC; ABEX, the great jazz of the 1950s and early 1970s punk rock. For me, the commonality between these three art forms consists of a direct, intense physicality borne of improvisation; a desperate search for content created out of materiality, gesture and process.

In my recurring themes of the Geisha, the Golem and the Navigator (among others) I use improvisation and direct physicality to fuel my formal decision making, which reflects my own deeply personal histories.

A work like the Navigator, while seemingly abstract, is based on my relationship with my father. He was a gambler, and struggled with this addiction and also in many ways finding his footing his whole adult life. The height of his life was when he was navigator in the Army Air Corps in WWII. I have a clear memory of sitting with him and my sister on a blanket in Prospect Park in the summertime. He would look at the stars and teach us about the constellations, and how he was able to navigate by the stars. I never understood when I was child why he was so lost, nor why I probably only connected with him in those moments. For me, the series of the Navigator is about my father, but also about how each of us navigates the challenges in our lives. They are abstractions in the service of deeply person truth.

I want from my practice what I want from my life; freedom, the courage to pursue that freedom and integrity.

I believe painting is a secular spiritual practice and at its highest levels speaks to our better nature. The more the artist is transformed by their process, the more one “lets go” of control, the more open the experience and the greater the record of that transformation. This experience actualizes the state of being part of something larger than ourselves, something we feel and know but don’t fully understand — something greater than oneself.

Every mark, every decision one makes leaves a record of the level of commitment by the artist. There is no right or wrong, no mistakes, just marks to react to. There is only the truth, of the experience and of the process, truth is beauty and beauty truth.”

Michael David, 2017

Sculpture Garden
Bruce Gagnier

Animula

“Making a figure out of clay, sometimes I am on the inside and sometimes on the outside. The ideas that form are often far away, emerging from the past, as in Donatello and sometimes near at hand like the pieces of a person walking down the street. Trying to pack everything in leaves a residue and distorts the package. The ingredients of the recipe for a figure are always the same but they come in various shapes and go together in different orders.”

Bruce Gagnier, 2017

Carriage House, Ground Floor
Larry Brown

Paintings

Fissure, 22016, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

“This small survey of paintings (2011-2016) represents a sampling of my attempted engagement (since 2005) with the deleterious effects of Global Warming (i.e. Climate Change) on this planet. These paintings are dystopian images reflecting on imagined scenarios of the current and future repercussions of these climactic effects.

Based on scores of years of extensive studies and research, climate scientists have now found that the myriad and ill-fated effects of climate change are compounding each other. Their interconnected relational complexities are resulting in larger and more frequent events. These climactic events are quickly surpassing even the most conservative outlook of how not only the climate, but virtually every aspect of humankind will be affected. Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are currently in the process of collapse with the loss of 100 billion tons of ice per year in Antarctica alone. This is just one example of many instances of predictable sea rise and catastrophic storm frequency affecting the cities and populations of the world. As we witness this, we must, by all accounts know that something is deeply wrong. This scientific research is now confirming a rather bleak and formidable series of problems that we can currently observe; in this moment, in real time, and with our own eyes. We are now in a highly compromised period of time. Hopefully this work will be an additional voice to the urgency of this pressing issue.”

Larry Brown, 2017

Carriage House, Second Floor
Linnea Paskow

Paintings

Sotterly Visit, 2017, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches

“By midday we reach the place where the event happens. We are here. The light is glistening and the pavement is purple-indigo. I see the Chesapeake. Our heads are dappled in light, dappled, dilapidated, they fall apart with all the light. Perhaps it would be unbearable to live without irritation and guilt. The light becomes brighter and the sea present with waves in the wind. I can see the pine tops disappear in the bright blue sky and I know it is my turn.”

Linnea Paskow, 2017

Carriage House, Third Floor
Daisy Craddock

A View of One’s Own

Barn in Autumn, Germantown, 2016, oil pastel on paper, 12 x 12 inches

“It’s been one year this August since I bought a fixer upper farmhouse with view in Germantown. It may take the rest of my life to come to terms with what folks here call the “view shed” but these recent works on paper are a beginning.

Moving studios after forty years in Soho was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It was also a great opportunity to reassess my paintings over time. Much of my older work is out in the world, and I hadn’t seen the backs of my storage units in years. Some of the early work looked pretty good, but some didn’t. I had the heady experience of ripping up about a third of my old paintings and keeping small fragments of areas that interested me. Since then I’ve been remounting these fragments, which become abstractions when seen in detail and out of context. It feels as if I’ve gone back in time and get to choose the road not taken.

The little diptych Convergence, is what remains of a large scale, rather forbidding neo expressionist landscape that was painted in 1987. I like the simplicity of form and gesture in the fragments, a suggestion of mountains and sky. It’s been emptied out of angst. That’s an approach I’d like to bring to my new view. With Hudson Afternoon, I’ve ripped up and reconfigured a more recent work from 2013. John (Davis) doesn’t really approve of ripping up old paintings, so I’m grateful for the chance to show a few of the fragments. Assuming all goes well, there will also be a painting of my new view.”

Daisy Craddock, 2017

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
Stephen Reynolds

Sculpture

Composed principally of wood and steel, Stephen Reynolds’ sculptures reference architecture, anatomy and scientific instruments. He employs contrasts between the warm imperfection of the archaic and hand-made, with the cold and rational precision of modern machine-made objects. In these pieces, fabrication processes that pre-date the middle ages such as forged steel are combined with references to 20 the century scientific and architectural objects.

It is in the practical object, where intellect and material merge, that Reynolds finds inspiration. The process of making is revealed by welded metal seams and rough-hewn wooden surfaces referring to the beauty of practical, functional objects where appearances are often secondary. The use of dissimilar materials and abrupt transitions between parts suggest ambiguous narratives, allowing a multiplicity of interpretations while always celebrating the beauty of utility.

On Saturday, July 22nd, there will be an exhibition of five artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through August 13th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, July 22nd from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Front Galleries & Sculpture Garden
Bruce Gagnier

Animula

Pau, 2017, plaster, 64 x 19 x 21 inches

“Making a figure out of clay, sometimes I am on the inside and sometimes on the outside. The ideas that form are often far away, emerging from the past, as in Donatello and sometimes near at hand like the pieces of a person walking down the street. Trying to pack everything in leaves a residue and distorts the package. The ingredients of the recipe for a figure are always the same but they come in various shapes and go together in different orders.”

Bruce Gagnier, 2017

Carriage House, Ground Floor
Pamela J. Wallace

in paper, in boxes

“All the sculptures in the series “in paper, in boxes” contain, in large or small part, handmade Abaca paper. Abaca has been a primary material in my sculptural work since 2008, but because it is quite unpredictable, I continue to explore the many ways it can be manipulated and formed. As a membrane, Abaca paper is thin and ephemeral, but also quite strong. As I stretch it over my box-like forms it becomes a container where I can place various unknown parts. The more I experiment with its density, color, and form, the more its characteristics are revealed to me and suggest new possibilities.

In many of these pieces, a narrative begins to emerge. In some cases a landscape is revealed and others suggest figures, but all sit inside (or on top of) a box in such a way as to imply a scene. In abstract terms they are depictions of space and shape, yet they are also imbued with an emotional quality as well as a sense of time that remains both indefinite and unspecific.

My work originates from my interest in, and physical engagement with, objects and material as well as the way three-dimensional forms occupy space. As my work mostly sits on the wall and within close proximity to it, the three-dimensional interactions of one form against another, though small, are of the utmost importance to me. In my studio, parts are laid out like specimens in a natural history museum or trays of parts on an assembly line. As each part is placed in the context of a sculpture, vague geometries begin to emerge. While I work, layers of paper, wood, cloth, and metal change as they are subjected to heat, water, light, and abrasion. Sewn elements and forged steel reference issues of work and gender. Working with a continuum of objects, I create systems and patterns that are often mapped out like constellations. My forms follow an invented non-linear geometry, where order comes and goes and the smallest detail is essential.” Peter Bonner

Carriage House. Second Floor
Peter Bonner

Paintings

From the moment She had Conquered him, She was Free (The Golden Tornado),2016, oil on panel, 12 x 10 inches

“I think of these paintings as narrative paintings, but not literal in any sense. They are open and made up of elements that can come from any moment in time or place, but it’s important that those relationships; which bits are in which paintings and where, are revealed to me in the act of making the painting. I attempt to resist the temptation of second guessing what the meaning of that might be, and title the works accordingly.”

Carriage House, Third Floor
Benjamin Pritchard

Paintings

Diptych (home), 2017, oil on linen, 28 x 18 Inches

“My painting is mainly concerned with looking and time so I like to suggest looking at them over a period of time – the more the better.

I find I’m constantly mystified as to what a painting actually is so I go about trying to answer this question through the process of making which increasingly mirrors the process of living.

In this sense I think of painting as revealing more than describing a certain situation or subject. By the end even if I work with very specific intentions I’m still often surprised by the outcome of these things it’s as if they have their own idea of being independent of Will.

Recently I took a trip away in order to leave the work behind. I hung out with families and kids, had meals and went for walks outside. It was great but I could feel the paintings calling me back late at night. The paintings finished and unmade exerted a pull.

It’s very important to get your mind right when making work to see the temptations and negative thoughts and to properly recognize comparison thinking and hierarchical thinking when it arises. This type of thought is present of course. We live amidst this in the USA but the kind of work I am interested in is concerned with a kind of freedom that necessitates a separation from branding, style and any fixation with overt marketability.

My slogan would be “the work is the work is the work”

Benjamin Pritchard, 2017

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
McWillie Chambers

Painting

Florida Beach – Umbrellas, 2016, oil on canvas, 22 x 30 inches

“The genesis of these paintings is a place filled with color and light, with the additional elements of freedom, sensuality, lust, empathy, and affection in the air. This is an imaginary place, but based on glimpses of our own world.

Recently I read a news item about the death of a man in San Francisco named Gilbert Baker. His name was unfamiliar to me but he was credited with the marvelous idea of the rainbow flag. Gilbert Baker gave the LGBTQ community, and the wider world, this wonderful reminder of hope and promise. According to the article he never profited from his idea and was quoted as saying, “The rainbow flag is a symbol of freedom and liberation that we made for ourselves. We all own this flag.”

Coincidentally I had painted a few paintings with rainbows and rainbow imagery. I decided to call this show “Find the Rainbow”, in honor of Gilbert Baker. I hope this group of paintings that I have made will remind my friends who see them of the light, color, and promise in the world. When you see a rainbow in a painting, or in the sky allow yourself the luxury of taking some time to look at it, and think about what it stands for.”

McWillie Chambers, 2017

On Saturday, June 24th, there will be an exhibition of six artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through July 16th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, June 24th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries

Farrell Brickhouse

New Work

“When I was around 8 years old I had a dream I was in a garden. I climbed this wall and realized that if I jumped over I would no longer have the protection and order of the garden and would be in the wilds. I jumped. It seems a life’s choice.
Making Art is a way to share the totality of what I’ve seen, touched and what has touched me. I believe the making of a painting needs that moment of epiphany and a trace of how the imagery conveyed thru paint was discovered and experienced by the artist. Not a graphic notation of the language of experience but the mystery of it.
As a mature artist now 67 years old, I find I have this large vocabulary to draw from. Imagery that has woven its way thru my entire career is available and malleable. For me Art is the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world. At its best making art is a revelatory experience, a conduit to the beauty and mystery in the miracle of simply being here.” Farrell Brickhouse, 2017

Sculpture Garden

Howard Kalish

Sculpture

“In my opinion a sculpture is an embodiment in sculptural form of a constellation of characteristics, emotions, associations and influences meant to present something beyond “representation” (re-presentation) to the viewer. I think this is true whether the sculpture is figurative or abstract, good or bad. A good sculpture is a heightened clear embodiment, perhaps even an archetype, which conveys something meaningful to the viewer beyond that which may be articulated in words (if that were possible words would be a much more economical means than a sculpture). Each of my sculptures is trying to embody a different constellation of meaning centered around a particular deep aspect of our life.” Howard Kalish, 2017

Carriage House, Ground Floor

Jenny Snider

Seeing Reading and Writing

It Ain’t What You Say…, 1985, oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 14 x 18 inches

Jenny Snider has been a lifelong student of art, literature, film, and history. She is showing new and recent works that reference the following sources, among others: the eponymously titledMemo from David O. Selznick; An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser; Middlemarch,by George Eliot; History: A Novel, by Elsa Morante; With Eisenstein in Hollywood, by Ivor Montagu; and Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible, two films by Sergei Eisenstein. Earlier paintings quote Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the Great American Songbook.

Carriage House. Second Floor

Alison Fox

Paintings

“The body of work I will be showing in June is called Chakra Paintings. The individual pieces are based on the ancient system of describing, isolating and identifying energy within the body as color, geometry, symbol, mantra, etc. known as the chakra system. These paintings take the color and geometry of each of the energy wheels as both the subject matter and formal constraint. I am interested in a prolonged relationship with the chakra system as an Artist and viewer of the Paintings I create.” Alison Fox, 2017

Carriage House, Third Floor

Rosie Lopeman

Paintings

Phantom Climb, 2016, oil on wood, 48 x 27inches

“The work is about transformation. The kind of transformation I am talking about is not about advancing along a linear trajectory, but is a deepening of my love for what already exists. This informs my decision-making: honoring the materials, honoring the mistakes, honoring my impulses. I am pursuing an ideal, while continually submitting to what is there in front of me. When something is finished, it feels like a relic of the past and a harbinger of the future at the same time.” Rosie Lopeman, 2017

One figure hovering over another, one figure standing a little too far away from another figure. A hunched figure, a bowed head, a raised hand that blocks another figure. So little movement and so much gets said.

Completely familiar and completely strange.”

Kathy Osborn, 2017

On Saturday, May 27th, a group of artists will open the season with a medley of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. In celebration, the gallery will have six solo shows (sculpture, photography and painting). The work will be on display through June 18th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, May 27th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries
Isidro Blasco

Underground Passages

“I take the subway every day, and very often I find myself looking at a particular corner or stairs, or section of the tracks. Every time they look very similar but not the same as the day before. And I wonder if other people like me also look at these same sections of the subway system, and if by this looking that we all do, somehow we are effectively changing them.

I am guessing all this is just an effort to relate to these places. There is an emotional restraint that we all exercise, conveying not destruction but disorientation, the unsettlingly simultaneous expansion and compression of space that the urban dweller experiences in their way through the city and through its underground.”

Isidro Blasco, 2017

Isidro Blasco was born in Madrid in 1962, and has lived in New York since 1996. He is a candidate for Ph.D. at the Architectural School of Madrid, and received his BFA from the Fine Arts School in Madrid. He was twice the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 1998 and 2010, and in 2000 he received the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in Visual Arts. In 2004, Blasco had a solo exhibition of his works at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and has since shown his work at the Museum of Modern Art/PS1, NY; and the Champion International Corporation (of the Whitney Museum of American Art), Stamford, Connecticut, among others. His works are included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, both NY; the Chicago Institute of Contemporary Art; and the Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN.

Carriage House, Ground Floor
Thaddeus Radell

Hard Rain

Lear, 2016-17, oil/wax on panel, 48 x 38 inches

“My work primarily consists of abstracted figure compositions- intuitive constructions that begin with random marks establishing larger masses of torsos, heads and limbs in an undefined setting. Each form results from a long struggle between line and plane. As a result, the surface of the picture becomes dense and heavily textured, as clusters of graphic phrases and patches of color are repeatedly effaced and reapplied. Paint builds up into a compact, rugged terrain, resembling scorched bits and fragments from an archeological dig.

My motive is to find a visual equivalent to such broad themes as loss, pathos, redemption and grace that consistently haunt my waking hours. Only by intuiting these emotions figuratively into paint will I be able to transcribe what matters to me, the human condition. Frustrated with this rather blind approach to composing the figure in a void, in 2015 I began to coalesce the work around my reading of Dante, Shakespeare and Sophocles. More specific images began to emerge- The Crossing of the Acheron, the Death of Cordelia, Oedipus Afflicted. However, from the depiction of actual scenes, the paintings soon evolved into broader meditations on the relationship between the protagonists of these classic works; Dante and Virgil, Lear and the Fool, Oedipus and Antigone. To say that the images are specific in any way, is misleading. The texts serve to propel me more directly towards the same themes. The characters and their environment remain almost non-descript, reduced to a few lines, some muddied tones, perhaps one dense color and yet charged with meaning, or to quote Helion, ‘loud with meaning’.”

Carriage House, Third Floor
Janice Nowinski

Paintings

Man at a Table, 2016, oil on canvas, 11 x 14 inches

“As Manet said “There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. When you haven’t, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.”

My paintings are made intentionally without a strategy or preconceived outcome in mind.

I do this in order to allow a place where sensations, intuition and spontaneity rule.

For several years, I’ve used photos as one of the sources for my paintings. Many I took myself and others I found in books, catalogs and on the internet. These images triggered the desire to respond in paint – from photos of masterworks to a friend’s snapshot of a holiday on the beach and everything in between.”

Janice Nowinski, 2017

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
Robert Simon

Sculpture & Works on Paper

Slumped Head, 2010, ceramic, 13 x 10 x 11 inches

” A figure sculpture is a three-dimensional illusion of a three-dimensional reality. In comparison with painting and other two-dimensional media, sculpture’s ability to occupy space in the same manner as the thing it represents affords it a more comprehensive equivalence to its subject. However, this defining feature of the medium also constitutes its principal artistic liability, in that it potentially draws more attention to what a sculpted figure still lacks, which is movement and life. In the absence of the ancient religious functions of statuary, what does it take to animate the modern sculpted figure, such that it might move the imagination of the viewer as if it possesses a spirit after all? A living being is all motion and flux; even a professional artist’s model can’t hold perfectly still under the artist’s sustained scrutiny and appears different from moment to moment. The model’s body can be rendered by means of molds, digital scans or photography, but such technologies freeze the subject at the moment of the recording. A live being on the other hand is a moving target, and so are the fleeting images of pure imagination; therein lies the sculptor’s challenge and opportunity.

I sculpt in clay after a living person, from memory or from my imagination, employing a modeling technique that evolved in conjunction with drawing, and is equally grounded in the tactile engagement with the medium. Modeling itself drives the content of the piece, without reliance on extrinsic signs, narrative or a specific image in mind. When a narrative is present, as with Pedagogue, the theme emerges from the process of pushing around lumps of clay—surrealistically, in a sense. The sculpted heads use touch to depict consciousness. In this exhibition, all but one are fully imaginary even though they may appear to have features of an individual, and there is an element of allegory in their formal structure. For example, the implied presence of an inner or outer conflict may encroach on observable appearance, pushing the common vocabulary of representation into uncharted territory, toward a shape that can’t be found on any known face. The taboo against touching someone’s head is so essential it barely needs enforcement, but portrait sculpture violates the rule by proxy. In sculpture, looking should reward the sense of touch, and obviate the need. In the hands of the artist, touch sublimates to vision by producing an art object for the eyes to lie on, primarily. Thanks to a companion taboo on touching the finished sculpture itself, the viewer inverts the sublimation by re-experiencing the artistic process in an act of projection that helps to bring the image to life in the imagination. The taboo on touching the sculpted object is thus not simply about preserving or privileging it, but an essential factor in a mode of reception advanced by its removal from the viewer.”

Robert Simon, 2017

Joseph Haske

Paintings

On Saturday, April 29th , a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work of Joseph Haske will be displayed with a reception for the artist on Saturday, April 29th from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition continues through May 21st.

Asterion 3, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

“The Minotaur is a monster created by the (misbehavior) adventures of others; his mother, her husband Minos, and the craft of the artist Daedalus. Half man half beast he lives with no friend or country, confined in his loneliness and rage to the dark labyrinth.
Ennobled only in death at the hands of Theseus the hero.

Does sorrow exist only in the perfectly formed?

These paintings are <compilations> of passages of paint phenomena, layered, disparate, and possibly incoherent. And like Asterion, often divided.

I wanted —in this search— to place myself outside my known area and find, perhaps stumble upon, another kind of order, another kind of beauty, another country.

2017

Joseph Haske

Paintings

On Saturday, April 29th , a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work of Joseph Haske will be displayed with a reception for the artist on Saturday, April 29th from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition continues through May 21st.sp;

Asterion 3, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

“The Minotaur is a monster created by the (misbehavior) adventures of others; his mother, her husband Minos, and the craft of the artist Daedalus. Half man half beast he lives with no friend or country, confined in his loneliness and rage to the dark labyrinth.
Ennobled only in death at the hands of Theseus the hero.

Does sorrow exist only in the perfectly formed?

These paintings are <compilations> of passages of paint phenomena, layered, disparate, and possibly incoherent. And like Asterion, often divided.

I wanted —in this search— to place myself outside my known area and find, perhaps stumble upon, another kind of order, another kind of beauty, another country.

Bricks,2017, oil on bricks, 8 x 8 x 3 inches

“Rolling hills, cows, trees, flatlands, billboards, telephone wires, big-rigs, native forests, gazing out the window, daydreaming, comparing landscapes, anticipating future travels, wondering where we will live in the next five years, New York packed space, no sense of the land, of the magnitude of the land, the smallness of the people, we compare ourselves to the size of the hi-rises and not to the hills or ocean, as we escape from the city, we see our place in the world, the human is small, an insignificant creature, as we escape the stratosphere, we realize that we are even smaller, each of us a microscopic dot in the universe, unable to escape the city physically, we travel in our minds to places we’ve been before, memories of the mountains of childhood, of the landscape of young-adulthood, of recent trips to cities and places we have never been before, anticipation of places to visit in the coming years, of a home, a yard, a place to rest after a day at work, in New York we are packed on top of each other, those of us who lack extra resources carve out space in our basements, our kitchens, our friends’ studios, to paint, and why do we paint? to bring what is on the inside to the outside, to play with paint, combine objects, to create a tangible memorial to a memory, to give us rest from what is going on inside of our heads and hearts, the paintings take us to our memories, and takes the viewer along too, although the viewer projects his or her own memories onto the painting, the physicality of the paint reminds us that this is an object constructed by another person and not an attempt to copy the image of the memory, a painting is not a photograph, nor should it be, a painting is a force made physical, the use of materials to construct the immaterial.”

Vilaykorn Sayaphet

Melinda Stickney-Gibson

THINKINGS

On March 4th, 2017 there will be a solo exhibition of Melinda Stickney-Gibson. The work will be on display through March 26th with a reception for the artist on March 4th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

And almost impossible to clearly define as to what it is, because literally everyone has a nuanced, personal definition of their own.

That’s the beauty, frustration, and freedom of it.

This body of work has that premise as it’s start, and is ongoing.”

Melinda Stickney-Gibson

Jared Buckhiester

Cessation of Violence

Installation made in conversation with Catherine Lord

On February 4th, 2017 there will be a solo exhibition of works by Jared Buckhiester. The exhibition will be on display through February 26th with a reception for the artist on February 4th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

In his first solo show at John Davis Gallery, Jared Buckhiester asks Catherine Lord to help make sense of the conflagration that is his work. And Lord assists, not as curator, but as trusted viewer, friend, and counterpoint. Allowing formal qualities to direct decisions of editing and placement, Lord disregards narrative to broaden the gaps of possible connections. This draws attention to the work’s strength and cohesiveness.

In a wooded clearing, a sweaty pro wrestler, truncated at his torso, projects a survival knife from his invisible blowgun. Two aboriginal bodies tumble forward while striking a classical Greco Roman pose. Their backs, one to the sky, one to the ground, flatly await the placement of a fountain basin. A cheer captain straddles a chalk line and Francisco Zapata lies dead in the arms of his bandit lover.

Buckhiester’s ceramics and drawings are connected, not by material similarities or a narrative structure, but the sense that they are born from the same soup, one that smells simultaneously psychosexual and political. In this show Buckhiester argues that a separation of the sexual and political is hard to come by when dealing with any old subjective human brain. Lord help us all.

Katherine Mojzsis

Shapes Effect

On January 7th, 2017 there will be a solo exhibition of paintings by Katherine Mojzsis. The work will be on display through January 29th with a reception for the artist on the 7th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

“extend dimension,” 2016, oil on canvas, 46 x 40 inches

“I take a path that does not follow the rules of perspective. I believe in the power of surfaces, that they have the ability to deepen and disturb – to “surprise” reality. Painting, drawing and collage allows me to build images, to deconstruct and dissect. Architectural forms, geometric shapes and invented landscapes are continuously adjusted until, in my hands, everything seems to be moving right. I explore free verse imagery in order to deceive the perception of rational space.”

2017

Pamela Blum

Like and Unlike

On Saturday, November 11th, there will be an exhibition of sculpture by Pamela Blum in the Main Galleries. The work will be on display through December 3rd with a reception for the artist on Saturday, November 11th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m. The Sculpture Garden and Carriage House will be closed for the season.

Artist’s intent: My works offer no perfect, permanent read. The exhibit’s title, Like and Unlike, asks the viewer to compare and contrast visuals, titles and metaphors. I see these works as comical, lyrical, abject, and satirical references to human foibles, misused tools, misunderstood words, and looming environmental catastrophe. The work begs to be touched.

What I stole from history: Art, like all invention, is infused with beliefs. In effect I “steal” from old beliefs to recombine them into new understanding.

Misunderstanding=recombination, invention: Many historical beliefs are seen as misunderstanding. That is the course of civilization. I try to make sense of current ideas about history, human behavior, societies, complexity theory, and energy as a kind of gravity opposing entropy. I realize that others’ ideas will supersede my own, so I embrace energy and entropy as important factors in my work.

Materials: For example, my sculptures are made of so-called “archival” materials. Encaustic paint covers some works, acid-free handmade paper others. Encaustic (beeswax) provides a metaphor for two contrasts: longevity and fragility. So does the paper. Wax in the right environment lasts thousands of years. But in moments, heat, cold, or touch can destroy it. Paper lasts for centuries. But fire, water, pressure, pollution, and skin oils can consume it.

Entropy & energy: Regardless of archival materials, my work, like my ideas, moves towards dissolution. It will not last forever. For now, my work fights entropy. I view vision, words and other language modes as forms of energy. I try to compress energy into meaning. My sculptures act like “strange attractors” where specific energies come together.

My works are improbable combinations of familiar components. The works’ titles imply a search, meaning. Their forms refer to animals, plants, tools, grammar and punctuation. Just as energy and entropy are opposites, so are whites and blacks, extremes that transition into each other. Surfaces, marks, and values emerge and submerge. Paper suggests effects of time and natural forces. Different contexts give arrangements of my work different meanings.

Thanks: I would like to thank John Davis, R&F Handmade Paints, Judy Sigunick, Richard Frumess, Millicent Young, and other friends who have contributed to this exhibit.

Pamela Blum, 2017

On Saturday, October 14th, there will be an exhibition of six artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through November 5th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, October 14th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Front Galleries
La Wilson

Constructions

John Davis began showing the work of La Wilson in 1983 in Akron, Ohio and continued with Ms. Wilson when his gallery moved to New York City. Including the 2004 retrospective that Mr. Davis curated, La Wilson Altered Objects (at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College), this upcoming show will be the 16th exhibition of Ms. Wilson’s work that the artist and dealer have presented together. It will also mark Ms. Wilson’s eighth exhibition in Hudson, New York, (the first, having been recognized and reviewed in The New York Times). She visits Hudson, New York from Hudson, Ohio where she lives and has shown extensively in the mid-west and New York City.

Ms. Wilson was given a retrospective of her work at The Akron Art Museum in 1986/1987 titled La Wilson Metaphorical Objects. Kathleen Monaghan (then Director) initiated and selected work and Barbara Tannenbaum (then Chief Curator and Head of Public Programs) facilitated the installation and supervised the production of the brochure with the late Ellen H. Johnson’s contribution of an interview with La and Ms. Monaghan contributing the introduction. In 1992 Tom Hinson, curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum, chose a group of La’s works to exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1993, the artist received the top award for sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art May Show. It was in this same year that La was awarded the prestigious “Cleveland Arts Prize in Visual Arts” for sculpture. In 2004 the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania) mounted a retrospective of her work, titled La Wilson Altered Objects with catalogue essay by Edward M. Gomez, curated by John Davis.

In all of her work, La Wilson has confounded those who have watched her development as an artist over the years with her ability to defy the material and transform everyday objects into visual delights that convey profound meaning and sustenance. In her words, “I try to steer clear of objects that are too loaded with meaning; but then, when I think about it, everything I use is loaded – snakes, pencils, firecrackers, matches, hair pins. What I try to do is free myself from the conscious associations so that the unconscious ones can take over. I am much more interested in what I don’t know than what I do know.”

Sculpture Garden & First Floor Carriage House
Brandt Junceau

recent work

fragment (Camille), terra cotta, 5.5 inches

“The exhibition is mostly drawn from continuing work, but also includes a piece from a project in progress, Sylvania, about the American essayist John Jay Chapman (1862-1933). Meadow, a figure in a landscape, “illuminates” a moral crisis in Chapman’s young manhood.

Two of the face-pieces are portraits. One from a friend, the other an imaginary likeness of Camille Claudel (1864-1943), based on a historical portrait from life. The Classical Head fragment comes from a continuing thought-experiment, which attempts to recover the model behind the Classical ideal head.

Two plaster “birds” come from a continuing preoccupation with winged figures. A credible winged figure is an impossible proposition, really, without recourse to ambiguity and metaphor. But maybe with enough ambiguity, anything is possible.

The bronzes outdoors attempt a “figure degree-zero.” Could one achieve the seeming presence of standing person in an undivided form, without parts, without replication of features?

Brandt Junceau, 2017

Carriage House, Second Floor (small rooms)
Brian Rego

Recent Paintings

“I think when something is truly beautiful, it is unknowable, and can reveal itself an infinite number of ways without denying the very quality that gives it its beauty. I paint to understand the things around me and to know my place with them. The process of making a painting allows me to find meaning in unsuspecting ways. I am grateful because I am coming to know a reality that is rich, strange, and full of surprises.”

Carriage House, Second Floor
Paul Hamann

Photographs

Self-taught photographer Paul Hamann has been making black and white images since 1968, exploring through various camera formats and printing techniques, the aspects of the natural landscape.

Inspired by the work of the great landscape photographers and armed with a keen interest in the natural mathematics of order/chaos, Hamann’s photographs seek to reveal the patterns and sequences in the exterior natural landscape in a way that transcends the subject matter and draws us into a space that surrounds the subject of the image.

Working first with a 35mm camera, Hamann began taking pictures with an eye to the details and abstractions that captured the essence of what he saw. He soon began to explore the greater range and depth of large format negatives—first working with a 5×7 camera and later experimenting with 4×5 and even larger formats. The technical requirements of shooting with the larger format cameras as well as the resulting clarity and definition of the images proved perfectly suited to the detail and precision of Hamann’s creative vision.

Susan Sontag said, “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” This distinction is certainly true of landscape photography. Although Paul Hamann’s photographs are essentially disclosing their subject they are also in effect constructed by the almost mathematical imagination with which they are composed, exposed and printed. The images themselves also construct a sort of meta landscape, stringing the tension between what is perceived on the surface of the image and what might be hidden behind, around, beneath or within it—the landscape of the interior.

This tension between what is constructed and what is disclosed is at the core of what Paul Hamann’s images are about—revealing the ordered patterns in the chaos, the motion in the perceived stillness, the interior of the exterior.

AERABLA – Paintings

I continue painting. I am an explorer: imagining floating over the land from a great enough distance. Aerial views of battered landscapes, degraded by human-caused disasters become, in pulling back from the chaos, a great beauty, which enables me to envision the absence of human intervention.”

Priscilla Derven, 2017

On Saturday, September 16th , there will be an exhibition of five artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through October 8th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, September 16th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Front Galleries & Sculpture Garden
Ben Butler

Sculpture

“My sculptures and drawings reflect the sensibility that all complex forms and phenomena emerge from simple but persistent processes. Throughout the natural world, unexpected richness and complexity can be traced to the most basic properties of materials and the most elemental forces. Accumulation and time render profound and varied results. Every thing, under close enough observation, will reveal the complete story of its making.

I work with strict systems that establish narrow parameters for making – finite materials are manipulated by highly repetitive gestures. The work develops a quality of unpredictability as gestures accumulate into form. Each piece is a meditation on our relationship to natural objects, as it simultaneously references both human and non-human processes. It is not designed but discovered, or grown, and it holds evidence of unseen forces at work.”

“Rarely in my experience has the meeting up of a father and son yielded such joy! A selection of paintings by Louis Finkelstein and his son Henry Finkelstein are being shown for the first time in adjacent spaces at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY. They give us a lot to contemplate.

Louis Finkelstein, a second generation Abstract Expressionist, made a name for himself as he exhibited with, spoke about and wrote about the artists of his generation and their influences. His son Henry was raised and schooled in this rich and fertile environment (his mother Gretna Campbell was in her own right a talented and successful artist). Henry has been teaching and exhibiting since early in his career and is sought after by students, art schools and collectors alike.

Louis and Henry work in territory first travelled by the impressionists. It is an arena demarked by the need to resolve the structure of the painting, the abstraction, whilst in the act of making the painting in-situ, in front of the motif. It’s a highly risky and uncertain approach, with no guarantees of success yet open to all sorts of possibilities.

The works in these exhibitions give us the opportunity to enjoy just how much they have invented and to glimpse into the nature of the relationship between father and son, comparing similarities and differences of approach, motif, manner and even influence. Both are creating worlds with their minds and coloring them with emotions, responses to the light and landscapes which they love. Pierre Bonnard once said; “The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world… the picture… which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him”.

It’s not surprising then, that here in Hudson, in the Twenty First century, we find the paintings of both Louis and Henry Finkelstein so rewarding and full of sensuous experience, but I suspect we’d draw the same conclusions no matter where they are hung. It’s a testament to the artistic vision of John Davis that he desired to see them here, together, now.”

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
Lee Marshall

New Watercolors

“A painting can be marvelous company. I try to paint that kind of painting.”

Lee Marshall, 2017

On Saturday, August 19th, there will be an exhibition of six artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through September 10th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, August 19th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Front Galleries
Michael David

Navigators, Golems and Geishas

The Navigator 4, 2012-2016, encaustic on wood, 36 x 42 inches

“Since I was a baby, I have always painted. My mother was a painter, and her father was a painter. My work has its roots in three great schools of art to emerge out of NYC; ABEX, the great jazz of the 1950s and early 1970s punk rock. For me, the commonality between these three art forms consists of a direct, intense physicality borne of improvisation; a desperate search for content created out of materiality, gesture and process.

In my recurring themes of the Geisha, the Golem and the Navigator (among others) I use improvisation and direct physicality to fuel my formal decision making, which reflects my own deeply personal histories.

A work like the Navigator, while seemingly abstract, is based on my relationship with my father. He was a gambler, and struggled with this addiction and also in many ways finding his footing his whole adult life. The height of his life was when he was navigator in the Army Air Corps in WWII. I have a clear memory of sitting with him and my sister on a blanket in Prospect Park in the summertime. He would look at the stars and teach us about the constellations, and how he was able to navigate by the stars. I never understood when I was child why he was so lost, nor why I probably only connected with him in those moments. For me, the series of the Navigator is about my father, but also about how each of us navigates the challenges in our lives. They are abstractions in the service of deeply person truth.

I want from my practice what I want from my life; freedom, the courage to pursue that freedom and integrity.

I believe painting is a secular spiritual practice and at its highest levels speaks to our better nature. The more the artist is transformed by their process, the more one “lets go” of control, the more open the experience and the greater the record of that transformation. This experience actualizes the state of being part of something larger than ourselves, something we feel and know but don’t fully understand — something greater than oneself.

Every mark, every decision one makes leaves a record of the level of commitment by the artist. There is no right or wrong, no mistakes, just marks to react to. There is only the truth, of the experience and of the process, truth is beauty and beauty truth.”

Michael David, 2017

Sculpture Garden
Bruce Gagnier

Animula

“Making a figure out of clay, sometimes I am on the inside and sometimes on the outside. The ideas that form are often far away, emerging from the past, as in Donatello and sometimes near at hand like the pieces of a person walking down the street. Trying to pack everything in leaves a residue and distorts the package. The ingredients of the recipe for a figure are always the same but they come in various shapes and go together in different orders.”

Bruce Gagnier, 2017

Carriage House, Ground Floor
Larry Brown

Paintings

Fissure, 22016, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

“This small survey of paintings (2011-2016) represents a sampling of my attempted engagement (since 2005) with the deleterious effects of Global Warming (i.e. Climate Change) on this planet. These paintings are dystopian images reflecting on imagined scenarios of the current and future repercussions of these climactic effects.

Based on scores of years of extensive studies and research, climate scientists have now found that the myriad and ill-fated effects of climate change are compounding each other. Their interconnected relational complexities are resulting in larger and more frequent events. These climactic events are quickly surpassing even the most conservative outlook of how not only the climate, but virtually every aspect of humankind will be affected. Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are currently in the process of collapse with the loss of 100 billion tons of ice per year in Antarctica alone. This is just one example of many instances of predictable sea rise and catastrophic storm frequency affecting the cities and populations of the world. As we witness this, we must, by all accounts know that something is deeply wrong. This scientific research is now confirming a rather bleak and formidable series of problems that we can currently observe; in this moment, in real time, and with our own eyes. We are now in a highly compromised period of time. Hopefully this work will be an additional voice to the urgency of this pressing issue.”

Larry Brown, 2017

Carriage House, Second Floor
Linnea Paskow

Paintings

Sotterly Visit, 2017, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches

“By midday we reach the place where the event happens. We are here. The light is glistening and the pavement is purple-indigo. I see the Chesapeake. Our heads are dappled in light, dappled, dilapidated, they fall apart with all the light. Perhaps it would be unbearable to live without irritation and guilt. The light becomes brighter and the sea present with waves in the wind. I can see the pine tops disappear in the bright blue sky and I know it is my turn.”

Linnea Paskow, 2017

Carriage House, Third Floor
Daisy Craddock

A View of One’s Own

Barn in Autumn, Germantown, 2016, oil pastel on paper, 12 x 12 inches

“It’s been one year this August since I bought a fixer upper farmhouse with view in Germantown. It may take the rest of my life to come to terms with what folks here call the “view shed” but these recent works on paper are a beginning.

Moving studios after forty years in Soho was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It was also a great opportunity to reassess my paintings over time. Much of my older work is out in the world, and I hadn’t seen the backs of my storage units in years. Some of the early work looked pretty good, but some didn’t. I had the heady experience of ripping up about a third of my old paintings and keeping small fragments of areas that interested me. Since then I’ve been remounting these fragments, which become abstractions when seen in detail and out of context. It feels as if I’ve gone back in time and get to choose the road not taken.

The little diptych Convergence, is what remains of a large scale, rather forbidding neo expressionist landscape that was painted in 1987. I like the simplicity of form and gesture in the fragments, a suggestion of mountains and sky. It’s been emptied out of angst. That’s an approach I’d like to bring to my new view. With Hudson Afternoon, I’ve ripped up and reconfigured a more recent work from 2013. John (Davis) doesn’t really approve of ripping up old paintings, so I’m grateful for the chance to show a few of the fragments. Assuming all goes well, there will also be a painting of my new view.”

Daisy Craddock, 2017

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
Stephen Reynolds

Sculpture

Composed principally of wood and steel, Stephen Reynolds’ sculptures reference architecture, anatomy and scientific instruments. He employs contrasts between the warm imperfection of the archaic and hand-made, with the cold and rational precision of modern machine-made objects. In these pieces, fabrication processes that pre-date the middle ages such as forged steel are combined with references to 20 the century scientific and architectural objects.

It is in the practical object, where intellect and material merge, that Reynolds finds inspiration. The process of making is revealed by welded metal seams and rough-hewn wooden surfaces referring to the beauty of practical, functional objects where appearances are often secondary. The use of dissimilar materials and abrupt transitions between parts suggest ambiguous narratives, allowing a multiplicity of interpretations while always celebrating the beauty of utility.

On Saturday, July 22nd, there will be an exhibition of five artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through August 13th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, July 22nd from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Front Galleries & Sculpture Garden
Bruce Gagnier

Animula

Pau, 2017, plaster, 64 x 19 x 21 inches

“Making a figure out of clay, sometimes I am on the inside and sometimes on the outside. The ideas that form are often far away, emerging from the past, as in Donatello and sometimes near at hand like the pieces of a person walking down the street. Trying to pack everything in leaves a residue and distorts the package. The ingredients of the recipe for a figure are always the same but they come in various shapes and go together in different orders.”

Bruce Gagnier, 2017

Carriage House, Ground Floor
Pamela J. Wallace

in paper, in boxes

“All the sculptures in the series “in paper, in boxes” contain, in large or small part, handmade Abaca paper. Abaca has been a primary material in my sculptural work since 2008, but because it is quite unpredictable, I continue to explore the many ways it can be manipulated and formed. As a membrane, Abaca paper is thin and ephemeral, but also quite strong. As I stretch it over my box-like forms it becomes a container where I can place various unknown parts. The more I experiment with its density, color, and form, the more its characteristics are revealed to me and suggest new possibilities.

In many of these pieces, a narrative begins to emerge. In some cases a landscape is revealed and others suggest figures, but all sit inside (or on top of) a box in such a way as to imply a scene. In abstract terms they are depictions of space and shape, yet they are also imbued with an emotional quality as well as a sense of time that remains both indefinite and unspecific.

My work originates from my interest in, and physical engagement with, objects and material as well as the way three-dimensional forms occupy space. As my work mostly sits on the wall and within close proximity to it, the three-dimensional interactions of one form against another, though small, are of the utmost importance to me. In my studio, parts are laid out like specimens in a natural history museum or trays of parts on an assembly line. As each part is placed in the context of a sculpture, vague geometries begin to emerge. While I work, layers of paper, wood, cloth, and metal change as they are subjected to heat, water, light, and abrasion. Sewn elements and forged steel reference issues of work and gender. Working with a continuum of objects, I create systems and patterns that are often mapped out like constellations. My forms follow an invented non-linear geometry, where order comes and goes and the smallest detail is essential.” Peter Bonner

Carriage House. Second Floor
Peter Bonner

Paintings

From the moment She had Conquered him, She was Free (The Golden Tornado),2016, oil on panel, 12 x 10 inches

“I think of these paintings as narrative paintings, but not literal in any sense. They are open and made up of elements that can come from any moment in time or place, but it’s important that those relationships; which bits are in which paintings and where, are revealed to me in the act of making the painting. I attempt to resist the temptation of second guessing what the meaning of that might be, and title the works accordingly.”

Carriage House, Third Floor
Benjamin Pritchard

Paintings

Diptych (home), 2017, oil on linen, 28 x 18 Inches

“My painting is mainly concerned with looking and time so I like to suggest looking at them over a period of time – the more the better.

I find I’m constantly mystified as to what a painting actually is so I go about trying to answer this question through the process of making which increasingly mirrors the process of living.

In this sense I think of painting as revealing more than describing a certain situation or subject. By the end even if I work with very specific intentions I’m still often surprised by the outcome of these things it’s as if they have their own idea of being independent of Will.

Recently I took a trip away in order to leave the work behind. I hung out with families and kids, had meals and went for walks outside. It was great but I could feel the paintings calling me back late at night. The paintings finished and unmade exerted a pull.

It’s very important to get your mind right when making work to see the temptations and negative thoughts and to properly recognize comparison thinking and hierarchical thinking when it arises. This type of thought is present of course. We live amidst this in the USA but the kind of work I am interested in is concerned with a kind of freedom that necessitates a separation from branding, style and any fixation with overt marketability.

My slogan would be “the work is the work is the work”

Benjamin Pritchard, 2017

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
McWillie Chambers

Painting

Florida Beach – Umbrellas, 2016, oil on canvas, 22 x 30 inches

“The genesis of these paintings is a place filled with color and light, with the additional elements of freedom, sensuality, lust, empathy, and affection in the air. This is an imaginary place, but based on glimpses of our own world.

Recently I read a news item about the death of a man in San Francisco named Gilbert Baker. His name was unfamiliar to me but he was credited with the marvelous idea of the rainbow flag. Gilbert Baker gave the LGBTQ community, and the wider world, this wonderful reminder of hope and promise. According to the article he never profited from his idea and was quoted as saying, “The rainbow flag is a symbol of freedom and liberation that we made for ourselves. We all own this flag.”

Coincidentally I had painted a few paintings with rainbows and rainbow imagery. I decided to call this show “Find the Rainbow”, in honor of Gilbert Baker. I hope this group of paintings that I have made will remind my friends who see them of the light, color, and promise in the world. When you see a rainbow in a painting, or in the sky allow yourself the luxury of taking some time to look at it, and think about what it stands for.”

McWillie Chambers, 2017

On Saturday, June 24th, there will be an exhibition of six artists in the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through July 16th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, June 24th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries

Farrell Brickhouse

New Work

“When I was around 8 years old I had a dream I was in a garden. I climbed this wall and realized that if I jumped over I would no longer have the protection and order of the garden and would be in the wilds. I jumped. It seems a life’s choice.
Making Art is a way to share the totality of what I’ve seen, touched and what has touched me. I believe the making of a painting needs that moment of epiphany and a trace of how the imagery conveyed thru paint was discovered and experienced by the artist. Not a graphic notation of the language of experience but the mystery of it.
As a mature artist now 67 years old, I find I have this large vocabulary to draw from. Imagery that has woven its way thru my entire career is available and malleable. For me Art is the providing of a genuine experience of what it is to be alive and in the world. At its best making art is a revelatory experience, a conduit to the beauty and mystery in the miracle of simply being here.” Farrell Brickhouse, 2017

Sculpture Garden

Howard Kalish

Sculpture

“In my opinion a sculpture is an embodiment in sculptural form of a constellation of characteristics, emotions, associations and influences meant to present something beyond “representation” (re-presentation) to the viewer. I think this is true whether the sculpture is figurative or abstract, good or bad. A good sculpture is a heightened clear embodiment, perhaps even an archetype, which conveys something meaningful to the viewer beyond that which may be articulated in words (if that were possible words would be a much more economical means than a sculpture). Each of my sculptures is trying to embody a different constellation of meaning centered around a particular deep aspect of our life.” Howard Kalish, 2017

Carriage House, Ground Floor

Jenny Snider

Seeing Reading and Writing

It Ain’t What You Say…, 1985, oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 14 x 18 inches

Jenny Snider has been a lifelong student of art, literature, film, and history. She is showing new and recent works that reference the following sources, among others: the eponymously titledMemo from David O. Selznick; An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser; Middlemarch,by George Eliot; History: A Novel, by Elsa Morante; With Eisenstein in Hollywood, by Ivor Montagu; and Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible, two films by Sergei Eisenstein. Earlier paintings quote Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the Great American Songbook.

Carriage House. Second Floor

Alison Fox

Paintings

“The body of work I will be showing in June is called Chakra Paintings. The individual pieces are based on the ancient system of describing, isolating and identifying energy within the body as color, geometry, symbol, mantra, etc. known as the chakra system. These paintings take the color and geometry of each of the energy wheels as both the subject matter and formal constraint. I am interested in a prolonged relationship with the chakra system as an Artist and viewer of the Paintings I create.” Alison Fox, 2017

Carriage House, Third Floor

Rosie Lopeman

Paintings

Phantom Climb, 2016, oil on wood, 48 x 27inches

“The work is about transformation. The kind of transformation I am talking about is not about advancing along a linear trajectory, but is a deepening of my love for what already exists. This informs my decision-making: honoring the materials, honoring the mistakes, honoring my impulses. I am pursuing an ideal, while continually submitting to what is there in front of me. When something is finished, it feels like a relic of the past and a harbinger of the future at the same time.” Rosie Lopeman, 2017

One figure hovering over another, one figure standing a little too far away from another figure. A hunched figure, a bowed head, a raised hand that blocks another figure. So little movement and so much gets said.

Completely familiar and completely strange.”

Kathy Osborn, 2017

On Saturday, May 27th, a group of artists will open the season with a medley of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. In celebration, the gallery will have six solo shows (sculpture, photography and painting). The work will be on display through June 18th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, May 27th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries
Isidro Blasco

Underground Passages

“I take the subway every day, and very often I find myself looking at a particular corner or stairs, or section of the tracks. Every time they look very similar but not the same as the day before. And I wonder if other people like me also look at these same sections of the subway system, and if by this looking that we all do, somehow we are effectively changing them.

I am guessing all this is just an effort to relate to these places. There is an emotional restraint that we all exercise, conveying not destruction but disorientation, the unsettlingly simultaneous expansion and compression of space that the urban dweller experiences in their way through the city and through its underground.”

Isidro Blasco, 2017

Isidro Blasco was born in Madrid in 1962, and has lived in New York since 1996. He is a candidate for Ph.D. at the Architectural School of Madrid, and received his BFA from the Fine Arts School in Madrid. He was twice the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 1998 and 2010, and in 2000 he received the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in Visual Arts. In 2004, Blasco had a solo exhibition of his works at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and has since shown his work at the Museum of Modern Art/PS1, NY; and the Champion International Corporation (of the Whitney Museum of American Art), Stamford, Connecticut, among others. His works are included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, both NY; the Chicago Institute of Contemporary Art; and the Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN.

Carriage House, Ground Floor
Thaddeus Radell

Hard Rain

Lear, 2016-17, oil/wax on panel, 48 x 38 inches

“My work primarily consists of abstracted figure compositions- intuitive constructions that begin with random marks establishing larger masses of torsos, heads and limbs in an undefined setting. Each form results from a long struggle between line and plane. As a result, the surface of the picture becomes dense and heavily textured, as clusters of graphic phrases and patches of color are repeatedly effaced and reapplied. Paint builds up into a compact, rugged terrain, resembling scorched bits and fragments from an archeological dig.

My motive is to find a visual equivalent to such broad themes as loss, pathos, redemption and grace that consistently haunt my waking hours. Only by intuiting these emotions figuratively into paint will I be able to transcribe what matters to me, the human condition. Frustrated with this rather blind approach to composing the figure in a void, in 2015 I began to coalesce the work around my reading of Dante, Shakespeare and Sophocles. More specific images began to emerge- The Crossing of the Acheron, the Death of Cordelia, Oedipus Afflicted. However, from the depiction of actual scenes, the paintings soon evolved into broader meditations on the relationship between the protagonists of these classic works; Dante and Virgil, Lear and the Fool, Oedipus and Antigone. To say that the images are specific in any way, is misleading. The texts serve to propel me more directly towards the same themes. The characters and their environment remain almost non-descript, reduced to a few lines, some muddied tones, perhaps one dense color and yet charged with meaning, or to quote Helion, ‘loud with meaning’.”

Carriage House, Third Floor
Janice Nowinski

Paintings

Man at a Table, 2016, oil on canvas, 11 x 14 inches

“As Manet said “There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. When you haven’t, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.”

My paintings are made intentionally without a strategy or preconceived outcome in mind.

I do this in order to allow a place where sensations, intuition and spontaneity rule.

For several years, I’ve used photos as one of the sources for my paintings. Many I took myself and others I found in books, catalogs and on the internet. These images triggered the desire to respond in paint – from photos of masterworks to a friend’s snapshot of a holiday on the beach and everything in between.”

Janice Nowinski, 2017

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
Robert Simon

Sculpture & Works on Paper

Slumped Head, 2010, ceramic, 13 x 10 x 11 inches

” A figure sculpture is a three-dimensional illusion of a three-dimensional reality. In comparison with painting and other two-dimensional media, sculpture’s ability to occupy space in the same manner as the thing it represents affords it a more comprehensive equivalence to its subject. However, this defining feature of the medium also constitutes its principal artistic liability, in that it potentially draws more attention to what a sculpted figure still lacks, which is movement and life. In the absence of the ancient religious functions of statuary, what does it take to animate the modern sculpted figure, such that it might move the imagination of the viewer as if it possesses a spirit after all? A living being is all motion and flux; even a professional artist’s model can’t hold perfectly still under the artist’s sustained scrutiny and appears different from moment to moment. The model’s body can be rendered by means of molds, digital scans or photography, but such technologies freeze the subject at the moment of the recording. A live being on the other hand is a moving target, and so are the fleeting images of pure imagination; therein lies the sculptor’s challenge and opportunity.

I sculpt in clay after a living person, from memory or from my imagination, employing a modeling technique that evolved in conjunction with drawing, and is equally grounded in the tactile engagement with the medium. Modeling itself drives the content of the piece, without reliance on extrinsic signs, narrative or a specific image in mind. When a narrative is present, as with Pedagogue, the theme emerges from the process of pushing around lumps of clay—surrealistically, in a sense. The sculpted heads use touch to depict consciousness. In this exhibition, all but one are fully imaginary even though they may appear to have features of an individual, and there is an element of allegory in their formal structure. For example, the implied presence of an inner or outer conflict may encroach on observable appearance, pushing the common vocabulary of representation into uncharted territory, toward a shape that can’t be found on any known face. The taboo against touching someone’s head is so essential it barely needs enforcement, but portrait sculpture violates the rule by proxy. In sculpture, looking should reward the sense of touch, and obviate the need. In the hands of the artist, touch sublimates to vision by producing an art object for the eyes to lie on, primarily. Thanks to a companion taboo on touching the finished sculpture itself, the viewer inverts the sublimation by re-experiencing the artistic process in an act of projection that helps to bring the image to life in the imagination. The taboo on touching the sculpted object is thus not simply about preserving or privileging it, but an essential factor in a mode of reception advanced by its removal from the viewer.”

Robert Simon, 2017

Joseph Haske

Paintings

On Saturday, April 29th , a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work of Joseph Haske will be displayed with a reception for the artist on Saturday, April 29th from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition continues through May 21st.

Asterion 3, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

“The Minotaur is a monster created by the (misbehavior) adventures of others; his mother, her husband Minos, and the craft of the artist Daedalus. Half man half beast he lives with no friend or country, confined in his loneliness and rage to the dark labyrinth.
Ennobled only in death at the hands of Theseus the hero.

Does sorrow exist only in the perfectly formed?

These paintings are <compilations> of passages of paint phenomena, layered, disparate, and possibly incoherent. And like Asterion, often divided.

I wanted —in this search— to place myself outside my known area and find, perhaps stumble upon, another kind of order, another kind of beauty, another country.

2017

Joseph Haske

Paintings

On Saturday, April 29th , a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work of Joseph Haske will be displayed with a reception for the artist on Saturday, April 29th from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition continues through May 21st.sp;

Asterion 3, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

“The Minotaur is a monster created by the (misbehavior) adventures of others; his mother, her husband Minos, and the craft of the artist Daedalus. Half man half beast he lives with no friend or country, confined in his loneliness and rage to the dark labyrinth.
Ennobled only in death at the hands of Theseus the hero.

Does sorrow exist only in the perfectly formed?

These paintings are <compilations> of passages of paint phenomena, layered, disparate, and possibly incoherent. And like Asterion, often divided.

I wanted —in this search— to place myself outside my known area and find, perhaps stumble upon, another kind of order, another kind of beauty, another country.

Bricks,2017, oil on bricks, 8 x 8 x 3 inches

“Rolling hills, cows, trees, flatlands, billboards, telephone wires, big-rigs, native forests, gazing out the window, daydreaming, comparing landscapes, anticipating future travels, wondering where we will live in the next five years, New York packed space, no sense of the land, of the magnitude of the land, the smallness of the people, we compare ourselves to the size of the hi-rises and not to the hills or ocean, as we escape from the city, we see our place in the world, the human is small, an insignificant creature, as we escape the stratosphere, we realize that we are even smaller, each of us a microscopic dot in the universe, unable to escape the city physically, we travel in our minds to places we’ve been before, memories of the mountains of childhood, of the landscape of young-adulthood, of recent trips to cities and places we have never been before, anticipation of places to visit in the coming years, of a home, a yard, a place to rest after a day at work, in New York we are packed on top of each other, those of us who lack extra resources carve out space in our basements, our kitchens, our friends’ studios, to paint, and why do we paint? to bring what is on the inside to the outside, to play with paint, combine objects, to create a tangible memorial to a memory, to give us rest from what is going on inside of our heads and hearts, the paintings take us to our memories, and takes the viewer along too, although the viewer projects his or her own memories onto the painting, the physicality of the paint reminds us that this is an object constructed by another person and not an attempt to copy the image of the memory, a painting is not a photograph, nor should it be, a painting is a force made physical, the use of materials to construct the immaterial.”

Vilaykorn Sayaphet

Melinda Stickney-Gibson

THINKINGS

On March 4th, 2017 there will be a solo exhibition of Melinda Stickney-Gibson. The work will be on display through March 26th with a reception for the artist on March 4th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

And almost impossible to clearly define as to what it is, because literally everyone has a nuanced, personal definition of their own.

That’s the beauty, frustration, and freedom of it.

This body of work has that premise as it’s start, and is ongoing.”

Melinda Stickney-Gibson

Jared Buckhiester

Cessation of Violence

Installation made in conversation with Catherine Lord

On February 4th, 2017 there will be a solo exhibition of works by Jared Buckhiester. The exhibition will be on display through February 26th with a reception for the artist on February 4th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

In his first solo show at John Davis Gallery, Jared Buckhiester asks Catherine Lord to help make sense of the conflagration that is his work. And Lord assists, not as curator, but as trusted viewer, friend, and counterpoint. Allowing formal qualities to direct decisions of editing and placement, Lord disregards narrative to broaden the gaps of possible connections. This draws attention to the work’s strength and cohesiveness.

In a wooded clearing, a sweaty pro wrestler, truncated at his torso, projects a survival knife from his invisible blowgun. Two aboriginal bodies tumble forward while striking a classical Greco Roman pose. Their backs, one to the sky, one to the ground, flatly await the placement of a fountain basin. A cheer captain straddles a chalk line and Francisco Zapata lies dead in the arms of his bandit lover.

Buckhiester’s ceramics and drawings are connected, not by material similarities or a narrative structure, but the sense that they are born from the same soup, one that smells simultaneously psychosexual and political. In this show Buckhiester argues that a separation of the sexual and political is hard to come by when dealing with any old subjective human brain. Lord help us all.

Katherine Mojzsis

Shapes Effect

On January 7th, 2017 there will be a solo exhibition of paintings by Katherine Mojzsis. The work will be on display through January 29th with a reception for the artist on the 7th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

“extend dimension,” 2016, oil on canvas, 46 x 40 inches

“I take a path that does not follow the rules of perspective. I believe in the power of surfaces, that they have the ability to deepen and disturb – to “surprise” reality. Painting, drawing and collage allows me to build images, to deconstruct and dissect. Architectural forms, geometric shapes and invented landscapes are continuously adjusted until, in my hands, everything seems to be moving right. I explore free verse imagery in order to deceive the perception of rational space.”